International Organization v2.3 dataset is a rich resource for scholars of international relations. Tracking the existance of international organizations and country memberships in them, the data’s various version have been cited over 450 times. Version 2.3 covers the time period 1815 to 2005, and records information about 529 IGOs and membership information over two million country-igo-year observations.

The project originated with Michael Wallace and David Singer (1970) and was extended by Jon Pevehouse, Timothy Nordstrom, and Kevin Warnke.

This webpage is meant provide students and the curious with an visual, explorable introduction to the dataset.

Below we answer some simple quetions like, “What’s the duration of an IGO?”

Plotting Duration of IGOs in Version 2.3

The figure below shows the durations of all the IGOs in the dataset, with the igos grouped by regions.

Explorable plots, by region

The data can be explored further in the interactive plots. For best results, “mouse-over” the end-points of the IGO representation.

Average duration of IGOs whose start and finish we observe

For IGOs that we observe start to finish in the IGO dataset, the mean number of years is 24.2, but the mean observed duration for any IGO is observed to be 31.4. When we look at only the IGOs that are observed start to finish, we are deleting the “censored cases” – cases for which we don’t know the full duration. Survival modeling might be helpful at estimating expectations about IGO duration.

Within regions there is quite a large variance in the means observed in IGO duration for the IGOs whose history we observe from start to finish — from 8 years to 22. It should be noted, that the later a region becomes active with IGOs, the lower the cap on what we might observe for the mean duration (for IGOs we observe from start to finish in this data set).

region mean duration
Africa 19.34783
Americas 17.16000
Arab or Middle East 8.25000
Asia/Pacific 19.16667
Europe 22.68421
no region assigned 28.46939